Thursday, August 18, 2011

It is better to irrigate all seeds, for you do not know which one will bear fruit first. - Burundi proverb

Water has been the theme of this season- either too much of it or too little. In the past couple of weeks we have had rain relief -- a couple of inches in one particularly generous day, and ample showers throughout for most of the area -- but this summer's drought isn't quite out of mind. Katie, one of the crop mob coordinators, sent this email to her CSA members that summed up the situation well:

"As you may be aware, this growing season has been more challenging than most so far. We started off the season with sooo much rain, too much to plant things in, meaning that direct seeded crops went in the ground later than usual, and the transplants carefully tended in the greenhouses got leggy and stressed before they could go in the ground. Many of the Spring crops (hakurei turnips, radishes, spinach) as well as some of the summer crops (first plantings of beets and carrots)didn't make it. The wet ground dried hard and crusty and the babyroots couldn't stretch out (sorry to make it sound so dramatic!). And of course, until just the past couple of days, we've had so much heat and so little rain. Turns out vegetables need water, steadily. The farms have been able to keep on on irrigating some of the crops, but some of them aren't set up for irrigation and/or the water supplies aren't able to cover everything - choices have to be made."

Our July crop mob at Sweet Land farm happened right at the end of the drought, and we got to see how our organic farmers deal with dry-weather woes.